1. In the Catholic/Lutheran option of the Revised Common
Lectionary, this same passage falls on Proper
22C, just four weeks earlier. See the reflections on this
text at Proper 22C.

2 Thess. 1:1-4, 11-12

Resources

1. James Alison, Raising
Abel, p. 120; the skipped-over verses, 2 Thess. 1:6-8,
are quoted as an example of apocalyptic language from Paul. Alison
takes on the view that Jesus was wrong about expectations of the
coming of the Lord's Day. See an excerpt of his basic
argument from pp. 124-127, "The
Apocalyptic Imagination."

2. N. T. Wright is also challenging the view going back
to Schweitzer and Bultmann that Jesus was wrong about apocalyptic
expectations. He argues that Jesus used apocalyptic and prophetic
language to correctly predict the "earth-shattering" events of the
Roman-Jewish War as the logical end to insistence on military
revolt as the way to liberation. For more on this, see Part
III of "My Core Convictions" essay. (Another good source on
Wright's views here is his Paul
for
Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians.)

Reflections and Questions

1. Once again I wonder about deleted verses -- in this instance,
verses about apocalyptic expectations that especially make sense
out of verses 11-12.

2. James Alison, Jesus
the Forgiving Victim, pp. 371-79. In an essay entitled
"Inhabiting texts and being discovered," section 4 gives a close
reading of the Zacchaeus story. Alison brings out how Jesus
incarnation of God's loving desire enables Zacchaeus to separate
from the crowd:

But Zacchaeus is no longer cowed, no longer hiding, no
longer small, no longer run by the way he was tied in to the crowd
before. Luke emphasizes the physical gesture: Zacchaeus stands
tall, and immediately sets about reconstructing a whole new way of
“being together” with his fellow citizens, not concerned with his
goodness or badness, happy to work through the details of
accusations of impropriety, about which the murmuring crowd will
have had more than a thing or two to say, but more than that,
completely concerned with his new way of belonging to Israel.

And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to
this house, since he also is a son of Abraham.”

And this is what Jesus emphasizes here, as in our previous passage
from Luke, where the straightened woman is also a daughter of
Abraham: YHWH delights in including people in, in bringing the
most improbable, and indeed unsuitable, people back in; YHWH has
no delight in resentful righteousness.

“For the Son of man came to seek and to save the
lost.”

Luke ends by pointing up something which was, I hope, also clear
in the Emmaus passage which we looked at in Essay 2. There the two
travellers thought they we the hosts and Jesus their guest, only
to find that he was hosting them, and had been the protagonist of
the story of which they had thought themselves knowledgeable, all
along. Part of what the presence of Jesus in the midst of people
feels like is just this curious inversion of perspective, and of
protagonism. At the beginning of our story here, it is Zacchaeus
who seeks to see who Jesus is, working around all the complexities
of his relationship with the crowd so as to get a glimpse. But
from the moment that Jesus looks up at him, calls him by name and
tells him he must spend the night in his house, it is clear that
the whole protagonism has been inverted. Not only is it, once
again, the apparent guest who is the real host. But all along, it
was the regard of Another other that was deliberately seeking out
this particular person, Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus’ seeking of Jesus had
been real, if still embryonic; it was the seeking of someone who
was tied up in a very complex pattern of desire. Perhaps the
beginning of Zacchaeus’ being found lay in the fact that, as part
of his lostness, he had had to begin to uncouple himself from the
immediacy of crowd desire, just so as to be able to get a look at
Jesus. Even that uncoupling, leading to his moment of unexpected
vulnerability, is part of the process of his receiving the regard
which recreated him, is part of what being sought and found by
Another other looks like. (pp. 377-79)

3. Robert Hamerton-Kelly,
sermon
from November 4, 2001 (Woodside Village Church).

1. In 2010 I'm seeing this passage as a companion to last
Sunday's Gospel (Proper 25C), the
Parable of the Pharisee and Tax Collector. Luke's redaction places
the end of Mark's journey to Jerusalem (Mark 10) in between these
two uniquely Lukan passages about tax collectors. But the
lectionary skips over the Markan material to bring these passages
together in consecutive weeks, making it easy for the preacher to
connect them. If a tax collector such as the one in the parable,
for example, goes home delivered from his sin ("justified") and
empowered by the Spirit to live a life of repentence, is Zacchaeus
an illustration of what that life looks like, by his promising to
pay back his ill-gotten profits to the poor?

Here are some further comparison's between the two stories:

Instead of a Pharisee who lives by human justice based on divisive categories
such as righteous-unrighteous, we have Jesus following God's justice of mercy and
reconnecting Zacchaeus to the family of Abraham and Sarah (and
Hagar?).

Instead of the Pharisee looking
down his nose in judgment on the tax collector, we have
Jesus literally looking up
in mercy at Zacchaeus in the tree.

Instead of a tax collector going to God's house, the temple,
praying for salvation, we have God in Jesus going to the tax
collector's house, proclaiming salvation.

2. In 2004 we moved this lesson up a week to use for our
"Commitment Sunday" (stewardship pledge campaign) since it
otherwise falls on either Reformation Sunday or All Saints Sunday
in the most common of Lutheran practices. It speaks well to the
claim that discipleship makes upon one's life. Jesus calls
Zacchaeus to be follower and that makes immediate changes upon how
he must live out his vocation: "Look, half of my possessions,
Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of
anything, I will pay back four times as much" (Luke 19:8).

We paired this text, however, with a different text from the
Hebrew Scriptures to help ring out our overall stewardship theme
of "Sharing Our Blessings." That text is Genesis 12:1-3:

Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and
your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show
you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and
make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless
those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and
in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

3. "I will bless you, so that you will be a blessing" has also
been a personal/family motto as we adopt (in April 2005) two
children from Liberia. Link to an article that appeared in
our local Racine newspaper under the banner of this verse, "'You
Will
Be
a
Blessing.'"